Writing with Scissors and Arranging Skin: Worlds of Woe and Happiness in the Child Welfare Scrapbooks of John Joseph(J.J.) Kelso, 1893 - 1894 Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the Child Welfare Scrapbooks of John Joseph (J.J.) Kelso, Ontario’s first Superintendent of Neglected and Dependent Children. Kelso was appointed to educate public sentiment following the passage of the 1893 Gibson Act that introduced new laws and policies regarding child management, and promoted the proliferation of the Children’s Aid Society across Ontario. I provide the historical context for a ‘snapshot’ of the scrapbooks by focusing specifically on a fifteen-month period between 1893 and 1894. (The scrapbooks were assembled over the period 1893 to 1940). I pay attention to what is archived, including Kelso’s handwritten notations and reflections, to explore what Kelso might be serving, and what is in service to him in his child-saving ideas and practices. The theoretical and methodological framing is inspired by critical studies that view archives not simply as objective depositories, but take seriously the notion of encountering the archives-as-process and subject. Most notably I invoke Ann Stoler’s concern of the ‘emotional economy’ that underpins colonial archiving practices. The theoretical influences variously borrow from Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Northrop Frye, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, and Jacques Derrida who inspire a reading of the artifacts that interlaces myth, the novel, body-culture, and Kelso’s personal experience into the narratives of law and governance in the animation of subjects. I examine Protestant culture, the liberal order, British Home Children, and Ontario’s pastoral history to consider pervasive currents in Provincial culture that influenced Kelso’s mission and archival choices. I explore how Kelso fabricates a personal archive alongside his professional mission of educating public sentiment with regards to a new understanding of the “everyday” of childhood experience in Ontario.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".